


Light-Blind

by Smaragdina



Series: Into the Light [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 23:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The only things he needs to know here are his scars and his flesh and the trembling deep in his bones, things simple and essential." Character study piece. The light of day is blinding upon Corvo's escape from prison; but as he crawls through the sewers toward freedom, he has more immediate pains to worry about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light-Blind

He can’t see.

The water of the Wrenhaven _cuts_ like a flurry of steel knives as he plunges under. It sears him to the bone. The deep breath he’d taken is suddenly gone from his lungs – and when Corvo gasps it’s the _river_ he inhales, filling his lungs, _burning_. Pain gouges inside his chest. He spasms. Jackknifes. Claws his way upwards without conscious thought, coughing, gagging, but when he breaks the surface he’s almost beaten physically down by the flood of light and sound that greets him.

Shouts of guards pummeling his ears. Horrible wailing scream of the alarm, incessant. Too loud. _Too much_. Whine of bullets in the air all around him. He can hear them, can feel them buzz and pockmark the water; but it’s too much noise, too much vibration, and the daylight is all white and _bright_ after six months in the dark and he still _can’t see_.

He picks a direction on blind panicked instinct and swims toward it, gunfire churning up the water in his wake, and sometimes what he breathes is freezing air and sometimes he goes under and what he breathes is freezing river water, and his muscles scream and he claws his way forward until he hits the solid wall of what _must_ be the sewer entrance and clumsily tumbles his way down into the silence and the blessed, _blessed_ dark.

He has escaped.

Coldridge prison is behind him. It is only the sewers, now. Two days’ journey to freedom, no more. Two more days of crawling through the dark before he can see the light of day again.

He does not move for a long time.

*****

His hands shake as he pulls the dead man’s boots onto his feet. All of him shakes.

In the past six months, with little else _left_ to him down in the dark, Corvo has learned his body very well. What it can do and what it _cannot_. All its limits. How much it will take before it will scar. How much it will take before he screams, or begs. How much food it needs before it begins to wither away from him, leave him with far too many hollow angles and far too many prominent bones.  How many months of wasting away in a cell it will take before all the muscle leaves him, all his calluses, so that he’s left with _nothing_ where there used to be such well-honed strength.

He has nothing left but his training. That, and some mad drive to keep moving.

Corvo doesn’t like to think about the second too much. He’s not sure what he’s moving _toward_ ; and if he stops and thinks, he knows that the answer will spiral back to _nothing_. Jessamine is dead. Emily is missing. He has been stripped  of his title and his purpose and his name. The light that had been so brightly shining on the surface of the river is _strange_ to him. He does not know these strangers who send him keys and notes in his cell. He does not know what kind of world that he will surface to find at _all_.

But these are worthless questions down here in the dark, where the shadows are so like shadows of prison. Flat. Familiar.

He has spent his time in Coldridge railing uselessly at the walls, thinking of Jessamine’s blood on the stones and Emily alone in the dark; now that he is _free_ of Coldridge, though, these fears will paralyze him if he allows them to settle around him. As long as he keeps moving they stream out behind him like a coat in the wind, never settling. As long as he is down here in the dark, his fears are more _pressing_. The only things he needs to know here are his scars and his flesh and the trembling deep in his bones, things simple and essential.

So this is what he knows:

There are cuts on his knuckles and knees and the palms of his hands. The soles of his feet are black and bloody; his feet are bare and he has not done half this much walking in months. His left shoulder throbs. He’s not sure if he wrenched it in climbing or if it’s from the rattle of a pistol’s recoil. Every muscle in his body aches, and he’s shaking all over from a combination of panic and hunger, exhaustion and relief.

He’s stopped noticing the cold, anymore, like he quickly and _forcibly_ stopped noticing the smell of sewage. This worries him most of all.

He can tell by the gnawing in his stomach that he’s been down here for a few hours. He has many more to go.

His hands shake as he pulls the dead man’s boots onto his feet; shake, horribly, as he laces them up, and Corvo has to stop and take a steadying breath before he can get it right. The boots are a size too large for him. He will trade blisters for cut-up soles; it’s likely that in another handful of hours he’ll have to abandon them altogether. But this is simply the exchange of one pain for another. It is a fair deal.

(This is another thing he’s learned, in the last six months: how to broker with pain. The language of the torture chamber. The respective costs of fire and steel, electricity and choking water. The worth of honor laid against the price of screaming in the dark. It’s something that he knows very, very well).

The man he’s taken the boots from is a withered husk. It does not do well for Corvo to think about how much this corpse’s body resembles his own – and so, he doesn’t. When he turns the corpse over to search at his pockets (on some stupid instinct of looking for money or other _Lord Protector’s_ things he does not need), he finds that there are streaks of blood down the man’s face. Dry and pooling under his eyes. Crusted. Corvo freezes, throat working.

It is not like he has much of a choice.                                             

He winds up taking the dead man’s scarf as well as his boots. He rips it in shreds and uses it to wrap his hands. The wool sticks to torn-up wet skin, but this will keep his hands a little more dry, at least – a little warmer, a little easier on a ledge or around the hilt of a weapon. This is all he can afford to worry about right now.

*****

The wound on his face _burns_.

It’s a thin burn mark. A line down his face in exact size and shape of a hot iron. The wound is barely a day old; not quite two, if his sense of time down here in the dark is anything close to accurate. Only half-healed. It’s alight with pain. It throbs every time he blinks; it throbs until it turns one-half of his vision red, the color of a branding coal.

When Corvo touches the side of his face, his fingers do not come away smeared with pus. Not yet. They come away coated in a thin film of dirt, though. Dirt and grime from the freezing water of the Wrenhaven, from whatever _else_ he’s waded through here in the sewers.

He’s shivering.

He supposes it is to be expected.

There’s a half-banked fire in the dark. Corvo has to shade his eyes from it. He spends a long time crouched in the shadows before he determines that it is _safe_ , that he’s the only living thing around – and still, he approaches it carefully, constantly checking his back.

He finds more corpses.

It is, again, to be expected.

He finds bottle of whiskey, as well. Half-full. It sloshes when he picks it up. The fume it gives off is strong and his stomach turns over just at the thought of drinking it – which would be a _stupid_ thing, anyway, with nothing to eat for two days.

The warmth from the fire is lovely. He sits down next to it and lets it leech into him, worm its fingers under the layer of cold sweat on his skin. He carefully pulls off his boots and unwraps his hands; carefully, _carefully_ , dabs capfuls of whiskey on the torn-up and broken skin, there and on whatever other injuries he can find. The little shocks of pain are bright. It’s not so bad, because he controls them and knows they’re coming, and because it’s just enough to keep him upright and awake and keep from being lulled into sleep by the fire.

It’s difficult. The warmth is so soothing and the light is so soft, flickering, somehow _unthreatening_ when compared to the bright and solid blaze of sunlight over the Wrenhaven. It would be _easy_ to stay here for an hour. Or two. Let the pain drain out of his bones. Sleep for a while. Pause. _Stop_. Corvo bites his lip and uses the sting of alcohol to _focus_ and shove these thoughts out of his mind.

(He’s afraid of what will happen if he sleeps)

(He is afraid of _many_ things, but this is all he dares wrap his mind around for now. He is afraid of what he will find at the end of the sewers. He is afraid of the world he will find when he stumbles back into the daylight).

When there is only a bit of whiskey left Corvo sets it down, considers, and unwraps the grey cloth from one of his hands. Stuffs it between his teeth. Bites down _hard_ – and upends the rest of the bottle over the festering burn on his face.

The cloth is enough to muffle his scream.

The scream is muffled enough that it does not bounce off the walls, does not ring and redouble like the way it does in the torture chamber, does not echo back to him with the memory of six months in a cell.

And the pain is _white_ , shuddering through his frame, bright and hot as the original branding fire – and it is _enough_ to shock him up and get him away from the lull and temptation of the fire before him, enough adrenaline to get him _moving_ again, forward and back into the dark.

*****

He finds a dose of Elixir in a dead man’s pocket.

It tastes tinny, flat. Aftertaste of smoke. Corvo remembers hating the taste of it _before_ , when he was still a man with a title and a name and flesh on his frame and everything else. He’d thought it tasted of wet charcoal and had almost gagged on it, once, made jokes with one of the guards of the Tower about doubling Sokolov’s pay if the man could just find a way to make it palatable.

It seems like those memories belong to someone else.

It tastes like life, now. That’s all. His world has shrunk and that’s all that’s important. And if he gags, or if his stomach clenches and threatens to overturn, it is only because he’s had nothing in his stomach for nearly three days. Corvo obediently drinks it down and dots the last of it over the worst of his open wounds (thinking of the Weeper rags he wears, thinking _forward_ for the first time in a while). And he moves on.

It’s an hour later when a flurry of flies catches his eye, and he follows their buzzing to another cluster of dead men and the remains of a meal spread out before them. There are more supplies on the shelves: enough to last a few days, at least. The smell of rot is thick. Most of the food is far, far gone. The pears and apples are half-liquiefied to soup; the soup of eel roils with maggots. Corvo puts a hand to his mouth as the smell and the sight catch in his throat and threaten to come back _up_ , as a confused mix of disgust and sudden hunger make him sway on his feet.

The supplies on the shelves, yes. Those are still sealed. Those are still _good_.

He finds a tin of whale meat whose contents are only slightly grey and metal-tasting on the edges. He finds a tin of pickled carrots and onions in slimy and cloudy brine who’s flavor is so sharp, salt and sweet, that he almost doesn’t know what to _do_. Caution says to eat only a little, to eat slowly. He ignores caution. He can’t help it. His body is curved over with hunger and it’s not even a hunger for _food_ , not quite – it’s the idea that if he has this he can keep _going_ , that the want and ache in him might eventually be for more than just these simple things, that if he has this he can go _forward_ and find the light and get out –

He _wants_. He wants _so much_.

It’s not a quarter of an hour later when Corvo stops by an open drain and wretches. And he loses all the food and the precious Elixir from before into the running water of the sewer.

*****

Light.

The cuts on Corvo’s hands are bleeding again. His shoulders and arms are one solid, draining burn. Climbing up the long chain to where he now stands had taken more out of him than he’d like to admit –and he wonders, now, how in the _Void_ he managed to make it out of prison. _How_ , exactly, he had the steadiness and strength and stamina to spring from cover to cover, make all the leaps he needed to make, find some measure of his old skill in a body that is only a wasted shadow of what it once was. That body, now, is all pain. And there is much more to go.

(He supposes that he does not particularly _care_ which twisted deity is watching over him, or why, just as long as they _keep_ watching)

None of this – the pain, the worry, the fear of the sound of guards ahead, the way the wound on his face is itching as it scabs over with the certainty of a scar – none of this is why he stops.

It’s because the sewers have opened for a moment and light of day is all above him, solid and bright and steady white.

When he’d plunged into the Wrenhaven, there’d been panic flooding through his veins. The sunlight had been _blinding_ and there had been more important things than giving his starved eyes time to adjust – things like bullets and the prison doors at his back. It is not so, now.

Corvo shades his eyes and stands in the shadows. Slowly, slowly, the white drops back. Colors reveal themselves, and then shapes. His eyes do not water and do not ache.

It is the first proper daylight he’s had the luxury to look at. It is the first proper daylight he has seen in six months. It is the first proper daylight he has seen as this new self, whatever he is becoming: this self who is starved and whip-carved-thin and curled around _hungers_ that he hesitates to name, who can wrap himself in Weeper rags because there are things more primal and important than tomorrow, who can use _pain_ to force himself to do what needs to be done.

He has dropped out of the world for six months, and it has moved on without him. And now, as his eyes adjust and he can straighten his back for a moment after days of crawling in the dark, he can finally see what sort of world he has escaped into. What sort of thing it has become. What sort of thing they have both become.

And this is the first thing Corvo sees:

The sunlight, white and solid, merciless and hard.

The rats, swarming over every centimeter of the ground, consuming everything they touch and stripping it down to ugly bone.

And the corpses, heaps of them, piled on top of each other, falling into the pit with wet and broken thuds, an endless stream of death upon death upon death.

(He supposes it is to be expected).


End file.
